CogBlogged from ‘April, 2008’

As I follow links and burrow around presentations on places like Slideshare its invigorating that a lot of people are embracing a more visual presentations style, where in fact a lot of the sones you see are all images, nary a bullet point to be seen. There is, however, a pitfall. On its own, these “shared” presentations are rather useless pieces of information, because they are just a bunch if picture flip cards. Seveal times last week, I looked at a few that came my way via twitter or RSS, and if this was all I had to go in terms of information, I have no idea what the message is, what is being presented. I can infer, maybe guess, but…. The presentation file is not the presentation w/o something more contextual. So if you are sharing your presentations, my thoughts are: Provide, links to notes, resources on a blogpost, [...]

So you want to earn techno points around the work group, or want to just beef up the tech rep at home? This one might earn you some technokarma points. Its a pretty obscure (at least i think so, maybe everyone knows about it) Firefox thing to in one click, generate search results from any site with a search box — without having to go to their form. The trick involved creating an abbreviation that Firefox can associate with a search field. Let’s say.. oh… you really dig using images from the flickr creative commons search. But it means always going to the general page, perhaps picking the license track you want to go down (sidelight-= where will they get an interface designer to collapse this to one page?? when??), waiting for the most recent ones to load, and then doing the search. Let’s say I like using the Attribution [...]

Yes, we know that Google has become the appliance of the web. If it were to go out, it would be on the scale (well not really) of losing electric or water. And while some may bemoan that students’ first thought to research is to Google-it, I find myself curious that often people ask me questions that are painfully easily google-able. Ok, I am in too deep, my natural reflex when I don’t know something, cant find something, need to get an example is command-k; type; return which is the sequence to put my cursor on the Google search field in Firefox, enter my keywords, and go. This is nothing new, I can remember dealing with this, actually much more, in the late 1990s. Often, it is a request for technologies for doing X. I found, or at least I thought it was more useful in the fishing versus nugget [...]

I am rather overwhelmed and honored when people tell me how they use, refer or just like the 50 Ways to Tell a Web 2.0 Story (heck I just found out the Andy Carvin blogged it with some nice words way back in November at PBS). It was just a half crazy idea that has played out nicely. So if people are using it a lot, I’d really like to have a more robust set of examples for the 50 tools for some I just had to find something, and they are all not relevant or educational. So if you, or your students/colleagues have created content with one of these, especially some fo the more obscure ones, please post a note on the discussion page. For example, “technolibrary” added a link to a wiki where students did stories on the Vietnam Wall, such as this one on Slide.. I’ll be [...]

I am far from alone being in individual ramrodded by a company that takes your money for a service it does not provide. But these dinosaurs are in denial of the asteroids raining down on them, as the net empowers us to put their evil deeds into the light. This is my little experiment to see if a single, frustrated, beaten down customer can take on a giant smelly pirate. Help me out my casting foul words and links their way. Hence, I am here to tell you the tale of the Alltel Pirates and how they have me chained to their brig. Oh how foolish I was to fall for their ship! Mock up of Alltel.com site plus pirate face from cc licensed flickr photo Pirate Phobia. In summary: The wireless internet service my organization pays monthly fees for has failed to connect, repeatedly disconnected, or has been wrongly [...]

Here’s a toe tapper – show your love for Facebook: Linktribution to Suw Charman-Anderson So now Facebook has a chat client built in. Where did they get that idea? Will they try to position themselves as also a hub for web-apps? While working on your FaceDocs will you be able to poke your colleague or toss them a sheep? Hey, I say this in fun. Facebook has become the ________ it is because people are in there, in masses, using these things. There is something there. I’ve followed a few discussions recently of people debating the potential/merits/pitfalls of using Facebook for “Acdemic Work” (is it “FaceBoard” or “BlackBook”?) and the various sides of how “students don’t want you in their space” (debatable, thats likely the expressions of the vocal one side). If it were me, I would not think about the idea of dumping course content into a “CourseWall”, but [...]

20080423 Foto by ghbrett posted 23 Apr ’08, 8.51am MDT PST on flickr Snap of me as camera man during Virtual Worlds panel at Internet2 Spring Member Mtg. CD Barkley (aka Alan Levine) giving his presentation in character in world. George Brett, the photographer here, had invited me to be a panelist on a virtual worlds session at the Spring 2008 Internet2 Meeting in Arlington… and I participated remotely from home in Strawberry Arizona. George was the camera man and microphone for my “presence”. It was after I agreed to participate that he mentioned the session started at 8:45 AM. That’s fine, I told him, I wake up early. No, that is 8:45 AM on the Easr Coast, Gah! I had to wake at 5:00 AM to comb my fur. I was the goofy avatar among some big VWorld names like Michael Rowe from IBM and Mark McCahill from Croquet. [...]

Now This is a Conference Bag! by cogdogblog posted 22 Apr ’08, 11.38pm MDT PST on flickr They don’t make them like the used to… most of ther bags I get at conferences end up in the filing cabinet. This heavy duty tool box was the cool giveaway at UCON97, the 1997 Macromedia Users Conference, besides the nice travel bag from the 2003 MERLOT conference, is the only one I have every kept. In the 1990s, my multimedia work revolved around Director. I actually scammed my way into the 1997 Macromedia conference on a “press” pass, a claim I made based on the amount of free coverage I provided Macromedia on the old Director Web site. And there is nary a web shred left of the old sites, as they all now point to the mothership’s mothership. Looking back, I see that I more or less rolled a basic blog [...]

I Think I Remember These by cogdogblog posted 21 Apr ’08, 8.12pm MDT PST on flickr My running shoes have not seen the light outside the closet since the PF Chang’s marathon in January. Today was the first run in like 3 months. Not very far (less than 2 miles), not fast at all, just moving… one step at a time.

My iPod Will Not Crash Your Airplane by cogdogblog posted 19 Apr ’08, 11.14pm MDT PST on flickr I’m getting more acute to the silly rules that we take on like mild sheep. Supposedly, any electrical device with an on/off switch can cause havoc on a jet’s navigation. What kind of engineers do they have at Boeing, et al? I dont buy it. So I have been experimenting. On 3 of my last flights, I kept my iPod Touch on through landing and lift off. There were no incidents. One 1 flight, I kepy my laptop open and worked on photo editing. The plane did not go into a tailspin. Then there was these announcements on Southwest that some new FAA regulation requires that passengers do not place any items in the seat back pockets during liftoff and landing. No cups. No magazines. No napkins. We all know the flaps [...]